The past six weeks have been devoted to encouraging and embracing our love of all things language and literature. Staff and students alike have jumped at the chance to share their stories.
The range of activities during English block has been broad. Wordle (and its maddening variants quordle and octordle) has been a daily challenge during Form time. Students have also stumbled over a gauntlet of fiendish tongue twisters. Why Betty bought a bit of butter if she knew it was bitter still baffles me!
World Book Day and Shakespeare Week both came and went. We learnt the value of some of the Bard’s most famous plays, delved into the fascinating world of the Shakespearean insult and asked the age-old question; Shakespeare or Batman?
Many students exercised their memory by taking part in the school Spelling Bee. An array of different strategies were employed to attempt to remember all those double ls and silent letters. Certificates were awarded to the strongest performers - well done to all involved!
The school community also shared some of their favourite stories with others. First, teachers recorded themselves reading a short extract from a piece of literature that had an impact on them. Students from Secondary listened to these recordings and then made recordings of their own for students in Primary.
The stories recorded by our teachers specifically for Early Years-aged children are also available on our YouTube playlist!
Our school hallways were brought to life by the unusual sounds of the Tannoy Tales and BISL students across Primary and Secondary got to express their own creativity in the Short Story competition. The standard of the entries was very high. It is amazing how much our students were able to pack into 100 words. The English department thought long and hard to determine a winner, a second place and an honourable mention for both categories.
There were also play scripts written and performed by Year 4s and fantastic persuasive writing pieces by Year 5s!
Our Head Boy, Head Girl and Head of Sixth Form also wrote a brilliant article referencing how learning environments inspire us in many different ways, with an interesting perspective of the view to the future, present and past from the top floor!
Our English block finished with some wonderful news on our recent 'Exemplary' accreditation by the Bell Foundation for EAL provision! At BISL over 90% of our students have English as an additional language and between 15-20% are on the EAL programme, receiving personalised support. As an 'Outstanding' school, we are very proud of our high-quality English provision across the school in every classroom, for every learner.
Mr Fordhamand the English DepartmentAll in all, a rather busy month! Hopefully students have enjoyed it as much as we have. Many thanks for all contributions from both students and staff.
We now look forward to our next block, dedicated to Science, with many exciting challenges in store for our students. You can already take a look at some practical Science challenge activities here!
